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Get your objections in now, Barnt Green residents urged

Posted on September 19 2011 at 10:50:31 0 comments

A public meeting called at short notice on a Friday evening still drew more than 50 Barnt Green villagers anxious over a planning application to build 88 homes on a prominent field.

The meting was called by Barnt Green Parish Council, which had earlier believed responses to the application by Banner Homes had to be sent in by September 21.

That date had since been changed to September 28, but the meeting went ahead at the Baptist Church Hall where parish chairman Coun Alun Davies urged everyone to make their views known to Bromsgrove District Council.

“People may feel very strongly against it,” he said, “but an emotional approach is not going to carry the day.

“We had a meeting with Andy Williams [the parish’s planning consultant] last night and, in his words, it is a very poor application that has been put in and it should be rejected by the district council.”

Coun Susan Whitehand, the parish councillor with responsibility for planning, explained that now an application had been submitted, public responses to the plans should go to planning officer Dale Birch at Bromsgrove.

It was an outline plan for a mix of four, three and two-bedroom houses as well as apartments and flats. Of the 88, 20 would be classed “affordable” and six “social” housing, to be run by a housing association.

As this was only around 30 per cent of the total, and Bromsgrove seeks 40 per cent affordable housing on new developments, Coun Whitehand said Banner Homes was offering to pay £586,000 to the district council to build ten more affordable homes in another location.

“There are three main points on which you can object,” she told the meeting, “our planning consultant and we believe it is valid to object on these.”

The first area Coun Whitehand highlighted was the impact on the site’s heritage “assets” - these are the listed Barnt Green Inn and the adjoining conservation area.

“Arguable, these three fields are the setting of the listed building and adjacent conservation area, so anything that is done has to be done with great care.

“You can only do things that are sympathetic to listed buildings and conservation areas.”

These second area of valid objection was the impact of any development on the landscape.

“As you know, these three fields where the land rises are an extremely visible site, behind which you have the Lickey Hills, the Green Belt and a landscape protection area.

“Anything you do is not going to improve them; it is going to cause harm.

“One major failure of this planning application is that there is nothing that tells you what this development is going to look like.”

Coun Whitehand went on to explain the third area of objection was this lack of detail in the application - it was merely a layout to demonstrate that you could fit 88 houses on the site, but “nothing about the scale of the buildings, nothing about their size, nothing about what they will look like.

“We can’t judge what the impact will be because we don’t have the information.”

One resident, who works for another housing developer, pointed out that as it was an outline application any detail would not yet be included.

Another resident, who is a landscape architect, said his “gut feeling” was that this should be treated as a visually sensitive site and that people should include in their objections to the planners the fact that it was a “gateway” site and so should be considered even more carefully.

He pointed out that the site was also a gateway when arriving in the village by rail and that this should also be considered.

The meeting concluded with Coun Davies again urging residents to make sure they wrote, either by email or by letter, to Dale Birch at Bromsgrove by September 28 expressing their objections - and guided by the advice they had been given, but adding any other areas of concern they felt relevant.

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